


when it all feels so big ('til it all feels so small)

by JBS_Forever



Category: Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Angst, But he is loved, Hurt/Comfort, Lots of it, Peter is struggling, and he is learning may will always be there for him, he's a little unsteady
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-26
Updated: 2017-09-26
Packaged: 2019-01-05 14:42:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12191907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JBS_Forever/pseuds/JBS_Forever
Summary: The world doesn't end here.Peter is learning that.





	when it all feels so big ('til it all feels so small)

**Author's Note:**

> This just ... happened. I couldn't sleep last night, so I wrote some angst. I hope you enjoy! Comments always appreciated :)

“I don't like it,” May says. “But I know you're going to do it anyway.”

That's how the entire conversation ends. May is right, of course. Peter is never going to stop being Spider-Man. Suit or no suit.

So they set rules. No patrolling after midnight – she'd argued eleven, but he'd argued one, so they settled in the middle – and he has to take off one day during the school week. He's allowed to patrol on weekends, but only if he still finds time to hang out with Ned and still finds time to spend with May.

He agrees.

He doesn't tell her about the Avengers invite. He doesn't tell her about Germany. It's over and done.

“I'm sorry,” is all he says.

She pulls him close and kisses his forehead. “I love you.”

It's not the answer he wants.

 

 

The day after she finds out, he tiptoes around the apartment. He's not trying to avoid her, but he's also not trying to run into her. He's still waiting for a lecture, for some anger-infused argument that will destroy everything between them – and, okay, yeah, it's ridiculous, but her acceptance has been too easy. Something isn't right.

She catches him before dinner. “We should go out.”

“Out?”

“Yeah. You know, the place we see through the window everyday.”

He doesn't laugh. He's a bundle of misplaced nerves and energy, waiting for an explosion. “Okay.”

She takes him to their favorite pizza place and he pulls pepperonis off his slice, sticks them into his mouth and chews silently. She knows he's being weird, but on her part she doesn't say anything about it.

“Ned knows,” he says. He doesn't know why. It comes from nowhere and leaves at the same time.

“I figured.” May takes a bite of her pizza.

“You figured?”

“He's your best friend,” she says. “And you two have been acting really weird lately.”

They have. Whenever they hang out, Peter locks them away in his room. He's scared Ned will reveal the rest of his secrets. He never has been good at keeping things to himself.

“Oh.”

Peter is expecting some kind of fight. _Yell at me_ , he begs. _Get mad_. _Do something_.

May doesn't. She clears her plate and goes back for seconds.

Peter never finishes his first.

 

 

There are days like these: He misses the train by only a couple seconds and in turn is ten minutes late for school. Flash is on his case all through their decathlon practice for no real reason other than he's in a bad mood. He throws wadded up paper balls at the back of Peter's head and offers sarcastic retorts whenever he answers a question.

Later, while Peter is patrolling, he comes across a guy mugging a girl in an alley and instead of being thanked for saving her, she threatens to call the cops on him. By the time he crawls back in through his window, he's so tired and annoyed the only thing he wants to do is dive into bed and sleep forever, but his mind is awake and loud and doesn't quiet.

He wonders why he even bothers.

 

 

And then there are days like these: He and May make meatloaf and set the stove on fire, but instead of a disaster, they end up opening every window and waving smoke away and laughing until there are tears in their eyes. At the thai place afterwards, the waiter brings them plates of free food and winks at May, and they start into another set of hysterics.

Back at the apartment, they watch reruns of _Friends_ and discuss the technicality of how Rachel and Ross _were_ on a break, so the argument should have been more about if Ross was wrong to sleep with someone so soon. They argue the terms of getting over someone and throw popcorn at each other as means of reason to defend their points.

It's warm and comfortable and nice.

And he almost forgets.

 

 

“Did she flip out?” is the first question Ned asks after Peter tells him May discovered him in his suit.

“No. She was actually pretty calm about it.”

“Oh. That's good though, right? Like, you're not grounded or anything?”

Peter shakes his head and continues on with the sit-ups he's pretending to be bad at. “She gave me a curfew. That's about it.”

“Wow.” Ned lets go of his feet. “My parents would have freaked.”

“Ned, you're not helping me make this look real,” Peter says.

Michelle strolls past them, a book in her hands, her eyes focused on the text. “It wouldn't look real with or without him,” she says.

It makes both of them freeze. She's gone before he can question it.

“What did that mean?” Ned asks.

“I have no idea.” Peter drops down again.

 

 

He asks Ned not to come over for a while.

“Just while things settle,” he says, but things _have_ settled and that's the part he's worried about. They've gone back to their regular routines and May hasn't said anything more about his crime fighting.

Peter feels like he's going to explode. He does things he knows will annoy her – leaves condiments on the counter, doesn't wash his dishes, throws his clothes all over the place – and she doesn't yell. She puts things where they belong, scrubs dirty plates, folds laundry.

He doesn't understand it. If he didn't know better, he would think she was doing it on purpose. That she was trying to get a rise out of him by not getting mad. Like some kind of strange revenge for him not telling her about Spider-Man.

But he does know better. May isn't the type to get even. She's the type to listen and try to fix things.

To Peter, though, she's only making it worse.

 

 

There are nights he can't sleep. Nights he sees buildings falling on him, feels tons of cement crushing his chest. There are nights, like tonight, when he can't breathe.

He sits in his bed and practices the things Tony taught him. In four counts, out four. In five, out five. Find three things you can see around you. Feel for empty space. Open windows and doors and stretch as far as you can.

It opens his lungs, but it doesn't stop the tears that always come with his panic. He shoves his face into his pillow so May doesn't hear him. Some nights he wishes she would come in and hold him close and let him pretend not to exist for a little while. Let him pretend he never sent his ex-girlfriend's dad to jail and ruined her entire life.

Most nights he's glad she doesn't.

 

 

At four in the morning, he's still coming down from his panic attack.

He types a message into his phone: **I don't think I can do this anymore**.

He never sends it to anyone. Usually he calms down before he can and then processes the regret he'd feel if he did.

But he doesn't relax in time. He clicks the button.

He means to send it to Ned.

He accidentally sends it to Happy instead.

 

 

The terror washes away the rest of his panic. He flips his phone on airplane mode, hoping to cut off the signal before the message has a chance to escape. But he knows it's too late. He keeps the service off and presses his palms into his eyes.

Maybe Happy won't read it. He doesn't read anything else Peter sends him.

 

 

An hour later, there's a knock on the front door.

Peter's eyes widen. He stumbles out of bed and races down the hall, hoping to intercept it before May can get the chance.

But it's not Happy.

It's Tony.

“Well.” He looks Peter up and down. “You better be lucky I had to be up early anyway. Although a little more sleep would have been nice.”

“What're you doing here?” Peter ushers him back, slipping out into the hallway with him and closing the door.

“Happy sent me. Said he got some kind of distressed message from you and that you wouldn't answer your phone.”

“Shit.” Peter never turned his signal back on. “Um, _shoot_ , I mean.”

“I'm not Cap, kid. Swear all you like, as long as you make it colorful and fun,” says Tony. “Now what's up? Because you look relatively fine, all things considered.”

“Nothing,” Peter says quickly. He looks at Tony in his fancy suit and he's acutely aware of how strange he feels standing next to him in his pajamas. “I'm fine. I didn't mean to send that to him. I, uh, I must have lost service or something. You know, cement walls and all that.”

Tony cocks an eyebrow. “Except these aren't cement walls, and you're a terrible liar.”

“I really didn't meant to send that to him. It was … it was for Ned. Well, it wasn't really for anyone, but it would have been Ned if I hadn't sent it to Happy by accident and I wasn't really thinking, I was just, you know, it was one of those things you type but don't plan on sending and I accidentally –”

“Halt,” Tony says, raising a hand. “It's much too early for me to interact with teenagers. Where is Hot May – I mean _Aunt_ May?”

“Sleeping.” Peter says.

“You didn't think to wake her instead of sending your accidental vague-book message to Happy?”

“I …” Peter feels the panic creeping up on him again. He tries to breathe through it. “It wasn't a big deal. I was just … it was just a momentary thing. I was … I had a little bout of anxiety is all.”

“And by that you mean a panic attack?”

He stares at the floor. “Yeah.”

“Listen kid, I understand panic attacks make you do dumb things,” Tony says. He laughs a sound without humor. “Believe me, I know. But if you need help, the best thing to do is not to turn off your phone after you accidentally let someone know you're struggling. It has a tendency to make people think you're in danger. Like Happy, for example.”

“I'm sorry,” Peter mumbles.

“Is there some reason you don't want May knowing? I have to assume there is, because you running to the door makes me think you don't want her to know I'm here.”

“She … she found out I'm Spider-Man.”

“And she, what, threatened to ignore you at all times? Throw you out on the street?”

“No,” he says defensively. “She was really cool about it.”

“Then what's the problem?”

The problem is she hasn't yelled at him. The problem is no one seems to be mad at him right now. Not Tony, who had to come here before the sun has even started to rise; not Happy, who sent Tony because he was concerned; not even Ned, who he told to stop coming over.

The problem is he wants someone to be mad, and no one is.

“I don't know,” he says, because as long as he's in the business of keeping secrets, he might as well add another.

  

 

He sends a dozen apology messages to Happy after Tony leaves.

Happy only responds once.

 **Don't ever do that again**.

It's the closest thing to anger Peter gets.

He takes it.

 

 

He fakes sick and doesn't go to school.

He sleeps away the embarrassment of earlier, sleeps away the panic and the anxiety and the feeling of being crushed.

It's not until May gets home from work that he wakes again. She comes into his room and touches his forehead and cheeks with the back of her hand. She makes him chicken noodle soup and sits with him on the couch and lets him watch whatever he wants.

He doesn't tell her he's not really sick. He hasn't gotten sick since before the spider bite.

But he's not telling her a lot of things.

And then, toward the end of _The Empire Strikes Back_ , May says, too casually, “So are you gonna explain why Tony Stark was at our door this morning?”

The rest of the movie is forgotten.

 

 

There's a weird, morphed version of the truth out there. Not a complete lie, but not exactly the right words. May accepts it with a grain of salt. She knows Peter isn't being honest with her, but she doesn't do anything about it. She can see him cracking down the edges. She waits for him to come to her on his own.

 

 

He has a bad day.

A very, _very_ bad day.

He's out on patrol when he comes across a scene he won't soon forget. A man in a black jacket with his hood pulled high is attacking another man. Before Peter can get there, the jacket man stabs the other. He runs as soon as Spider-Man lands.

Peter applies pressure to the wound, has Karen call 911. He tries to web it up to stop the bleeding. It works, for the most part, and soon the paramedics are pulling him up and shoving him aside so they can work on the man. Peter stands with his back against the wall and watches. All he can see is Ben. Ben bleeding out, Ben dying in front of him, Ben Ben Ben Ben Ben.

He'll never see him again.

The news picks up word of the story. _Spider-Man saves local man after stabbing_. Tony's call comes over the display inside his mask. He doesn't answer. May's calls come too. Karen tries to convince him to answer someone, because he's crying much too hard and he feels like he's suffocating. He sits on a roof top where no one can see him and watches the sun go down.

It's past midnight when he finally crawls back through his window. May is waiting in the living room. She looks like for once she's ready to be mad, but when Peter rips of his mask her face changes, and before anything can be said she grabs him in an embrace and pulls him close.

He cries like he did the day they lost Ben.

“I'm sorry,” he says. “I'm sorry I couldn't save him.”

May doesn't blame him. She's never blamed him for that.

But Peter wishes she did.

 

 

They order in thai food. Peter makes a quick call to Tony to let him know he's okay. Tony wants him to come into the lab on Friday. Wants to see what kind of medical advances they can make with his web formula.

He and May don't talk about Ben. They don't talk about the man Peter saved. They just eat way too much food and watch funny videos online and reminisce about the old Chinese place a few blocks away that's now a pet store and how sometimes they'll still accidentally swing by there looking for it.

Peter calms down, but he doesn't forget.

He'll never forget.

May won't either.

 

 

For a while, nothing happens.

Peter lets Ned start coming over again. He goes to Avengers Tower and works in the lab with Tony. He spends more time with May. He spends more time with Michelle – which, yeah, he's a little weirded out by it. He's not quite sure how it even happened.

She makes comments he doesn't understand, like, “How's the internship?” and “Hey, are you afraid of spiders?” She adds questions into the decathlon meetings and directs them to him and Ned. “What bug has the longest life span?” “What is the X-Gene?” “Who out of the Avengers has signed the Accords? And who is _supposed_ to?”

Peter drags Ned aside to see if he's spilled anything. He hasn't. He's just as confused as Peter is.

He decides to ask Michelle what's up with all the weird questions. The only thing she says is, “I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Peter thinks she knows _exactly_ what he's talking about.

 

 

She spills it two days later.

Peter and Ned are in the band room during lunch building a Lego Death Star when she comes in.

“You guys are nerds.”

“You're the one who chooses to hang out with us,” says Peter.

“Yeah, because I don't have anyone better.”

She makes her way over to a cubby and digs around inside.

“What're you doing?” Ned asks.

“Looking for my book.”

“You're not even in band. Why would it be in here?”

“Sometimes things mysteriously end up in other places.” She shrugs and heads back to the door. “But other times they're not as sneaky as they think. Isn't that right, Peter?”

It's the first time he's positive Michelle knows his secret.

 

 

He corners her after school.

“Who told you?”

“Who told me what?”

“You know what,” he says. “So who told you?”

She smirks. “No one told me. You're just painfully obvious about it.”

She pats him on the shoulder and shuts her locker. “Next time you want to talk about stealing Captain America's shield, maybe don't do it while you're surrounded by other people. Moron.”

Peter blanches and watches her go.

 

 

He doesn't sleep that night.

His mind is racing a million miles an hour and he's churning over everything that's happened since Germany. The alien technology, Toomes, the wings, the bomb, almost killing his friends, almost getting crushed to death by a building, taking down a jet, crashing a car.

And now Michelle knows.

Shit.

 

 

“Don't worry, Spider-Boy,” she says the next day. “I'm not interested in selling you out.”

“It's Spider- _Man_ ,” he says.

“I don't care.”

And just like that everything is fine again.

The world doesn't end here.

 

  

And then, one day, it does.

At least, it feels like it does.

There's no real reason. Peter patrols, he gives directions to lost old ladies, he accidentally saves someone who doesn't need saving, and he stops someone from breaking into a store only to learn they work there and locked themselves out.

Everyone, in a fashion so unlike Queens, is nice to him. Maybe it's because he saved that guy. Maybe it's because they are just in a good mood. He doesn't know why, but he hates it.

He's frustrated and strung too tight and, beyond that, he's _angry_. He's angry that no one is angry even though they deserve to be.

So he breaks things. He gets a text from Happy that he ignores. He gets another from Ned that he also ignores. He shatters windows in abandoned buildings and kicks through doors in warehouses. He thinks about the one that collapsed on him and the panic fuels his aggression.

Boards and glass bottles and anything he can reach. He shatters them all. Sends exploding webs and taser webs and normal webs and uses his fists, his feet, anything he can think of it.

And then he takes it back to the apartment. He ditches his suit and moves to the most breakable room in their place – the kitchen. They own a hundred mugs, it feels like, and too many china plates they never use. Peter wants to destroy all of them. Wants to ruin everything so May will finally snap at him.

“Peter?”

He doesn't get the chance. May is there before he can shatter the mug he's holding, and then his motives shift. He whirls around.

“Why aren't you mad?” he demands.

May looks around like she's missed something. “Why would I be mad? You didn't do anything.”

“Yes, I did!”

“Okay,” May says calmly. “What did you do?”

Peter's grip tightens on the handle. It starts to crack. “I sent Liz's dad to jail,” he says. “I lied to you. I went to Germany and I fought against Captain America. I fought with the Avengers and fought against the Winter Soldier and I didn't tell you. And I ditched school and I split a ferry in half and I couldn't save Ben.” Tears prick at his eyes. “I couldn't save him and you didn't even care. You didn't care, May.”

“That wasn't your fault,” May says.

“Yes, it was. And then you just let me be Spider-Man. You didn't get mad. Why aren't you mad?”

May sighs. “Peter, I hate that you're Spider-Man. I hate it with everything inside me. I wait up for you to come home every night because I'm terrified one day you're not going to. I'm terrified I'll lose you too. You're the only thing I have left. But if you think, for one second, that I don't understand why you're doing it, then you're wrong.”

Peter pries open his grip and sets the mug on the counter.

“I know you're having a hard time,” May says. “I can see you. I can always see you. And I knew getting mad wasn't going to do anything to help. Trust me, I'm furious you didn't tell me sooner. I'm furious with Tony Stark for making you that suit and for lying to me. But there's no point yelling at someone who is already beating themselves up. You're putting the world on your shoulders, Peter, and you don't have to. I wanted you to come to me on your own.”

“I just ...”

“I know. You wanted someone to get mad at you because you feel guilty. But Ben's death wasn't your fault. The spider bite wasn't your fault. Even Liz's dad wasn't your fault. I know you're trying to make things better. You're trying to help people and keep people safe. I don't like that it has come to this, but I will always be here for you. You don't have to try to set me off. You don't have to try to set any of us off.”

And there it is. There's the reason he didn't know. He wanted someone to be mad at him because he felt like he deserved it. And maybe he did.

Maybe he does.

Maybe he still wants it, because he still feels guilty. And maybe that will never go away.

“There is nothing,” May says, “that you could ever do to make me stop loving you.”

It's a start.

He nods mutely.

“And we'll talk about your punishment later. After you explain this Germany thing to me.”

He scrubs at his face, lets out a weary laugh. “Okay. I'm sorry, May. I'm sorry for everything.”

She pulls him close and kisses his forehead. “I love you.”

It's not the answer he wants, but it's the one he needs. It's the reminder that, despite how it feels, despite how he's felt for a long time, life isn't over.

The world doesn't end here.


End file.
